Jetty web server - C News does not expire by scanning the
C News does not expire by scanning the newsgroup’s directory, but simply checks the history file if the article is due for expiration.129 If your history file somehow gets out of sync, articles may be around on your disk forever because C News has literally forgotten them.130 You can repair this by using the addmissing script in /usr/lib/news/maint, which will add missing articles to the history file or mkhistory, which rebuilds the entire file from scratch. Don’t forget to become user news before invoking it, or else you will wind up with a history file unreadable by C News. Miscellaneous Files There are a number of files that control the behavior of C News, but are not essential. All of them reside in /etc/news. We describe them briefly here: newsgroups This is a companion file of active that contains a list of each newsgroup name along with a one-line description of its main topic. This file is automatically updated when C News receives a checknews control message. localgroups If you have a lot of local groups, you can keep C News from complaining about them each time you receive a checkgroups message by putting their names and descriptions in this file, just as they would appear in newsgroups. mailpaths This file contains the moderator’s address for each moderated group. Each line contains the group name followed by the moderator’s email address (offset by a tab). Two special entries are provided as defaults: backbone and internet. Both provide, in bang-path notation, the path to the nearest backbone site and the site that understands RFC-822 style addresses (user@host). The default entries are: internet backbone You do not have to change the internet entry if you have eximor sendmail installed; they understand RFC822 addressing. The backbone entry is used whenever a user posts to a moderated group whose moderator is not listed explicitly. If the newsgroup’s name is alt.sewer and the backbone entry contains path!%s, C News will mail the article to path!alt-sewer, hoping that the backbone machine is able to forward the article. To find out which path to use, ask the news-admin at the site that feeds you. As a last resort, you can also use uunet.uu.net!%s. distributions This file is not really a C News file, but is used by some newsreaders and nntpd. It contains the list of distributions recognized by your site and a description of their (intended) effects. For example, Virtual Brewery has the following file: world everywhere in the world local Only local to this site nl Netherlands only mugnet MUGNET only fr France only de Germany only brewery Virtual Brewery only log This file contains a log of all C News activities. It is culled regularly by running newsdaily; copies of the old log files are kept in log.o, log.oo, etc. errlog 129 The article’s date of arrival is kept in the middle field of the history line and given in seconds since January 1, 1970. 130 I don’t know why this happens, but it does from time to time.